Proven marketing tactics to grow your startup.

If you’ve found product market fit – then we can start driving targeted visitors, fixing leaky funnels and scaling what works. We’re here to win new customers worth more than our fee. Here’s how:

Startups using a secret weapon / FLANK

DevicePilot

Sysdig

SalesSeek

“We work with FLANK because they're creative. Their ability to take a problem and produce something unique, on brand AND with minimal touch really sets them apart.”

Jorge SalameroDirector of Technical Marketing @ Sysdig

We analyseall of your touchpoints

We understand how tech startups like to operate. Though we're all wonderfully different, so first we need to learn about you, your product, your marketing and how you communicate - at every stage.

Awareness

Acquisition

Activation

Revenue

Retention

Referral

Step 1: Awareness

How do users first learn about you? Awareness campaigns should be tied to objectives lower in the funnel. Awareness metrics like impressions & traffic are not commodities – some (those likely to convert further down the funnel) are worth more than others.

Thought:Where do your paying customers hang out?

Step 2: Acquisition

How do you first learn about your users? This is your first transaction with a user, typically in the form of gated / locked content – in exchange for an email address. This is a crucial place for you to qualify + segment your marketing leads.

Thought: What did your paying customers do before paying?

Step 3: Activation

Why do your users want to try? Activation is the process where your user actually tries your product. Acquisition is solving a customers problem with content; activation is solving that problem with a sample of your product.

Thought:What are the problems your product solves?

Step 4: Revenue

Why do your users want to pay? For a SaaS company, this is when a customer makes their first month’s payment. The most important thing to remember about this stage in the funnel – is that our work is not done!

Thought:Why would anyone on trial not want to pay?

Step 5: Retention

How 'sticky' is your product? This is the incremental revenue being generated from a given user. This is important, because from this stage, the Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is a fixed cost. Meaning, from this point forward, additional revenue is “free.”

Thought:What does inactivity look like for your product?

Step 6: Referral

Referral data is one of the most important, and often overlooked metrics to focus on. Which is interesting… If you're solving problems, and you have happy customers then it's also one of the easiest and quickest wins.

Thought:What would your customers say about you?

We thinkand prioritise

We want to encourage, develop and score new marketing tactics. Ideas come quicker and boards move faster when we join your team.

Brainstorm.

Ideas tend to be everywhere in startup offices – that's what happens when people love their work. So let's turn that passion, into more progress.

Prioritise.

Now, it’s time to decide which ideas you’ll focus on and test. Here’s a few elements to consider:

What’s the probability that it will work?

What’s the potential impact?

How much will this cost for us to action?

Scoring ideas based on these criteria, gives space for the best of the bunch to float to the top. Let's set an action plan to get these done.

We executefrom all angles

See unlike other agencies, that offer PPC. Or videos. Or new websites… We're marketers first - and leverage every best practice. Which means we brainstorm based on what will work to grow your business, not what we can sell to grow ours.

Copywriting

Strategy

SEO + Paid

We writethe playbook

We want to make sure that what we've actioned, meets the objectives we set. If they do, then it's time to systemise the wins. If they don't – we need to understand what went wrong.

Realistically, we'll want to boil down what we learnt. If we like it, then let's document the step-by-step process into a “marketing playbook” and turn this initiative / tactic into a streamlined, repeatable process.

We start and scale marketing for awesome startups
Does that sound like a bit of you?

Startup Marketing Process

It's best to look at marketing as a big process – it's not one golden tagline, or one slick landing page. It's about influencing users at multiple times of their life with you. Here's our take on Dave McClure's Pirate Metrics framework.

Step 1

Awareness

Significantly, awareness for awareness sake is not the objective here. The ultimate goal is to tie awareness campaigns to objectives lower in the funnel, so that you are driving that awareness for the right people - the right people being: those that are more likely to convert further down the funnel.

Step 2

Acquisition

Acquisition is when you can begin to identify your customers as individual users. For a SaaS company, this typically takes the form of PDF downloads – Case Studies, Whitepapers, etc…

It's exciting when you can turn a data point, into a person. You can begin to fill out a profile, understand their attributes, and sculpt both your product and the way you position your product to them.

Step 3

Activation

There is an important distinction to be made between Acquisition and Activation. You are solving a customers problem with content during the acquisition stage, but you are solving their problem with a sample of your good or service during Activation.

Step 4

Revenue

Revenue needs no introduction. For a SaaS company, this is when a customer makes their first monthly payment - it's a good feeling.

The most important thing to remember about the revenue stage of the pirate metrics framework is that there is plenty more work to do, and a lot more for marketers to optimise! A fun thought here is once a user becomes a customer, you don’t need to guess who your customers are or what they care about—you have their info!

Step 5

Retention

Retention is the amount of incremental revenue that you can generate from a given customer.

You want your customers to be “sticky”, because the Customer Acquisition Cost is fixed from the Revenue stage. Meaning: From this point forward, additional revenue is “free.”

Step 6

Referral

Referrals are one of the most important, and often metrics.

If you don't have happy customers, and you're not solving a real problem - then you have big problems. Assuming you have happy customers, you should convince them to tell others about how great your product is. I'd guess they wont have huge problems doing that.